The characteristic feature of things that arouse pleasure or delight, especially to the senses of a human observer.
Thus, "beauty" is the most general term of aesthetic appreciation.
Whether judgments about beauty are objective or subjective has been a matter of serious philosophical dispute.

Circular reasoning.
The "informal fallacy" of (explicitly or implicitly) assuming the truth of the conclusion of an
argument as one of the premises employed in an effort to demonstrate its truth.

Example: "Since firefighters must be strong men willing to face danger every day, it follows that no woman can be a firefighter."

Although arguments of this sort are formally
valid because it is impossible for their conclusions to be false if their premises are true, they fail to provide logical support for their conclusions, which have already been accepted without proof at the outset.

Belief that all mental phenomena can be explained by reference to publicly observable behavior or dispositions to behave.
Modern psychology, exemplified by Watson and
Skinner, is founded on the methodological principle that only overt human conduct (as opposed to introspection) is available for objective study, including scientific
prediction and confirmation.
In a more radical metaphysical form, behaviorism may deny the reality of mental entities or processes, all of which are held to be reducible to physical things or events.
Logical or linguistic behaviorism, like that of
Gilbert Ryle, holds that assertions about mental events can always be analyzed in behavioral terms.
Contemporary functionalism is often regarded as a modest form of philosophical behaviorism.

Affirmation of, or conviction regarding, the truth of a proposition,
whether or not one is in possession of evidence adequate to justify a claim that the proposition is
known with certainty.
For example: I believe that two plus three equals five, I believe that Bill Clinton was President of the United States in 1995, and I believe that I will live another ten years. The first belief is also a case of knowledge; the second is probably knowledge; but the third is (at present) merely belief.

Ukrainian philosopher who participated in the Revolution but was exiled to France in 1922.
Distressed by totalitarian developments in communism, Berdyaev adopted a religious version of
existentialism in which the themes of
anxiety and
authenticity are conveyed through the medium of traditional Christian
mythology about sin and redemption.
His emphasis on human
freedom, however, often raised the suspicions of more orthodox believers.
Vselenskost' i konfessionalism
(Universality and Confessionalism) (1933) exemplifies the passionate individualism of this self-styled "believing freethinker," which seldom won institutional approval.

French philosopher.
Rejecting sterile mechanistic accounts of the natural world, including those of
Darwin and Spencer, Bergson developed an account that emphasized the
subjective experience of
time as the ground for human
freedom in
Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness) (1889),
Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory) (1896), and
The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1934).
In L'Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution) (1907)
Bergson argued that thought, creativity, motion, and evolution are all products of a creative impulse {Fr. élan vital} that emerges in opposition to material entropy.
Bergson won
the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927.

Latvian-British historian, diplomat, and political philosopher.
In Four Essays on Liberty (1969), Berlin drew an important distinction between the positive freedom to govern one's own actions and the negative freedom from external interference in so acting.
Societies that differ in their conceptions of liberty, Berlin argued, are likely to exhibit profoundly different social structures.
The values embodied in different cultures, then, are commonly incompatible with each other.
Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (1939) and
Historical Inevitability (1954) criticize the philosophy of
Marx, with special treatment of his view of the necessity of history.

The conjunction of two conditionals, the antecedent of each of which is the consequent of the other; that is, any statement of the form: "P if and only if Q."
Although they may have other uses, all biconditionals involve at least the logical structure of
material equivalence.

Supposition that every proposition must be either true or false.
The status of this supposition is controversial, especially with respect to future propositions about human action. Thus, for example, if
"I will vacuum the carpet tomorrow." were regarded as already true (or false) today, it would seem that I cannot freely choose whether or not to clean.
Note the difference between bivalence and excluded middle.

American philosopher and long-time professor at Yale University.
In The Nature of Thought (1939),
Blanshard defended
absolute idealism and argued that causal necessity is a genuine feature of the natural world.
According to Blanshard's
Reason and Analysis (Open Court, 1962),
the philosophical methods of Anglo-American philosophers during the twentieth century were fundamentally misguided.
He also rejected the prevalent
non-cognitivism of twentieth-century ethicists by defending a thoroughly naturalistic moral theory in Reason and Goodness (1962).